The Roof Tree

Between the smoke-darkened walls of the mountain cabin still murmured the last echoes of the pistol's bellowing, and it seemed a voice of everlasting duration to the shock-sicke...

Sprung from a race which had gone to seed like plants in a long-abandoned garden, once splendid and vigorous, old Caleb Harper was a patriarchal figure nearing the sunset of his...

It was a distraite maiden who greeted the visiting swain that night and one so inattentive to his wooing that his silences became long, under discouragement, and his temper sull...

A week later Dorothy led Kenneth Thornton and Peter Doane to a place where beside a huge boulder a "spring-branch" gushed into a natural basin of stone. The ferns grew thick the...

The old Thornton house on Defeated Creek had for almost two decades stood vacant save for an occasional and temporary tenant. A long time back a formal truce had been declared i...

Cal Maggard sat gazing into the blaze that leaped and eddied fitfully under the blackened chimney. In one hand drooped the sheet of paper that he had found fastened to his door...

When Cal Maggard closed and locked his cabin door late the next afternoon he stood regarding with sombre eyes his message of defiance which, it seemed, no one had come to read.

To the man lying in the soaked grass and moss of the sandstone ledge came flashes of realization that were without definite beginning or end, separated by gaps of insensibility....

Cal Maggard lay unmoving as the old man's chair creaked. Over there with his back turned toward the fire stood Bas Rowlett, his barrel-like chest swelling heavily with that exci...

Through the rest of that night Old Jase lay on a pallet spread before the fire, rising at intervals out of a deathlike slumber to slip his single suspender strap over his bent s...

The room that Dorothy Harper had given over to the wounded man looked off to the front, across valley slope and river--commanding the whole peak and sky-limited picture at whose...

"I kain't suffer ye ter go away without I tells ye suthin'," he said, "an' I fears me sorely when ye hears hit ye're right like ter withhold yore blessin' atter all."

The blossom had passed from the laurel and rhododendron and the June freshness had freckled into rustiness before the day came when Dorothy Harper and Cal Maggard were to be mar...

Each of the two was acting under orders that day, and each was spreading an infection whose virus sought to stir into rebirth the war which the truce had so long held in mercifu...

Into the grave near the house the rough pine coffin, which had been knocked together by neighbour hands, was lowered by members of both factions whose peace the dead man had imp...

Here, he told himself, he ought to be happy beyond any whisper of discontent--save for the fret of his lingering weakness. Through the open door of the house came the voice of D...

Parish Thornton and Aaron Capper stood for a few moments watching the departure of the two other horsemen, one of whom was a spy and a traitor--for Aaron himself meant to wait h...

Riding with the weariness of a long convalescence, Parish Thornton passed the house where for two days only he had made his abode, and turned into an upward-climbing trail, gloo...

Even the peppery Opdyke did not venture to break heatedly in on the pause that followed those regretful words. Into the minds of the majority stole a sense, vague and indefinabl...

The sun, dropping into a western sea of amber and opal, seemed to grow in diameter. Then it dipped until only a naming segment showed and the barriers darkened against the after...

They helped Opdyke into the house and bandaged a wound in his leg, but old Jim sat looking on with a stony face, and when the first aid had been administered he said shortly: "P...

The earliest frost of late September had brought its tang to the air with a snappy assertion of the changing season, when Parish Thornton first broached to Dorothy an idea that,...

An instant later, with a roar of fury, as he realized the trick that had been played upon him, Bas was beating his fists against the panels and hurling against them the weight o...

From the shallow porch of a house over which brooded the dismal spirit of neglect and shiftlessness a woman stood looking out with eyes that should have been young, but were old...

Had those enterprising spirits who had undertaken to organize a vigilance committee, modelled upon the old Ku Klux, been avowedly outlaws, banded together only for the abuse of...

The window panes were frost-rimed one night when Parish Thornton and Dorothy sat before the hearth of the main room. There was a lusty roar in the great chimney from a walnut ba...

Parish Thornton had used all his persuasion to prevent Dorothy's going with him to Virginia. He had argued that the solace of feeling her presence in the courtroom would hardly...

Across in Virginia, Sally Turk, the wife of the dead man and the sister of the accused, had rocked her anæmic baby to sleep after a long period of twilight fretfulness and stood...

Slowly they watched the Kentuckians troop out of the court house, the late prisoner in their midst, and marvelled to see Will Turk join them with the handshaking of complete ami...

Sim Squires was finding himself in a most intricate and perplexing maze of circumstance; the situation of the man who wears another man's collar and whose vassalage galls almost...

Strangely enough it was as though the old man's capacity for being shocked or infuriated had been exhausted. There was no roar of maddened wrath or denunciation of denial now. N...

Sim, standing at the barn door, had watched Parish Thornton ride away that morning with a troubled heart, as he wondered what sequel these events would bring for himself. Then h...

One might have counted ten while the picture held with no other sound than the breathing of two men and the strident clamour of a blue-jay in a hickory sapling.

When Parish Thornton had brought his captive down the slope that afternoon he had left his rifle in safe concealment, not wishing to hamper himself with any weapon save the revo...

Sim Squires knew that when the brief farce of the trial took place he would be called forward to testify with a few prearranged lies. In his mouth was a pebble, put there to cha...

As though to mask a picture of such violence the tree's heavy canopy made that spot one of Stygian murk, and even the moon hid its face just then, so that the world went black,...